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One must draw upon the naive materials of one’s own childhood to conceive, however remotely, the status of mind of those rare spirits who looked first towards human brotherhood. One must consider the life of some animal, one’s dog, one’s cheetah or one’s pony, to realize the bounded, definite existence of a human being in the early civilizations.
One’s cheetah indeed!
These strands of sexuality, utopia and escape play a large role in Wells’s work, both before and after that Himalaya in his career. Even ‘one’s cheetah’ turns up again. The Research Magnificent features the peculiar relationship between Mr Benham and a beautiful woman called Amanda, whom he marries. Amanda, to him, is ‘a spotless leopard’, while he, to her, is ‘Cheetah, big beast at heart’. So they address each other. The terms are transposed from real life. In Wells’s long involvement with Rebecca West, she, to him, was ‘Panther’, while he, to her, was ‘Jaguar’. They escaped into an animal world.
Not that there is a one-to-one relationship between the fictitious Amanda and Rebecca West. For after Benham and Amanda are married, he starts staying away from her, to her disgust, and Amanda shrinks into a Jane Wells role. Wells liked his freedom, and it is his voice we hear when Mr Benham says, evasively, to Amanda, ‘We should meet upon our ways as the great carnivores do’. He then proceeds to trot round the world, overlooking the fact that jaguars occupy only narrow stretches of territory.
All this metaphorical use of cats—of which Wells was avowedly fond—and gardens and utopian innocence is immediately accessible to the imagination. The nature of a metaphor is not so much that it should be exact as that it should illuminate with a mysterious glow. That mysterious glow is certainly present in early Wells, and accounts for much of his abiding popularity. But something got in the way of the glow, and that something manifested itself as politics.
We are here to re-evaluate Wells. My contribution would be to say, in part, that Wells is interesting when he talks about people, or social conditions, or science, or those possible worlds of his science fiction; but he was, or has become, terribly boring when he goes on about politics, as, after the mid-twenties, he increasingly does. Remember the Open Conspiracy? The Life Aristocratic? The Voluntary Nobility? The World Brain? The New World Order? Such ideas are now lifeless. We salute the endeavours and intellect of the man who conceived them; but it is as well to face the fact that Wells was no political seer, and there is nothing that turns to dust as promptly as yesterday’s politics.
Those reversals of which Wells was so fond in his fiction were carried into his life. He turned from a creative writer into a sort of political journalist. Why did he do it? What drove him away from the literary to the ceaseless activity represented by The Work, Wealth and Happiness of Mankind?
I will mention one more leopard in Wells’s life and then drop the subject. That leopard leads us into what was next to come in the way of reversals. This time it is a Leopard Man, the famous one who appears in The Island of Dr Moreau. Rendered half-human by Moreau’s vivisection, the Leopard Man escapes and Prendick tracks it across the island, discovering it at last ‘crouched together in the smallest possible compass’, regarding Prendick over its shoulder. Then comes a passage I still find moving:
It may seem a strange contradiction in me—I cannot explain the fact—but now, seeing the creature there in a perfectly animal attitude, with the light gleaming in its eyes, and its imperfectly human face distorted with terror, I realized again the fact of its humanity. In another moment other of its pursuers would see it, and it would be overpowered and captured, to experience once more the horrible tortures of the enclosure. Abruptly, I slipped out my revolver, aimed between his terror-struck eyes, and fired.
The beast in the human, the human in the beast—it’s a powerful theme, and one which seems in Wells’s case to owe as much to inner emotion as to evolutionary understanding. At the end of Island, when Prendick gets back to civilization, he cannot lose his horror of the ordinary people round him, scrutinizing them for signs of the beast, convinced that they will presently begin to revert—an interesting passage derived from Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.
Wells has presented us with many striking images, of which this one I have quoted is not the least. To me, this coining of images is one of the true marks of imaginative genius, greater than the creation of plot or character. But as Wells grew older, the ability to coin images grew fainter. From the image—enigmatic, disturbing, beautifying—he turned instead to elucidation, the image’s opposite. It was another reversal. He set his considerable talents to educating and enlightening the world, stating, in his autobiography, ‘At bottom I am grimly and desperately educational’. That was his mid-thirties, when the urge to pontificate was taking over, when he became shut in a schoolroom of his own making, far from the sportive leopards of his youth.
That remarkable short story, ‘The Door in the Wall’, written when Wells was almost forty, is precognitive in showing what became of his early vision. Wallace, the central character, spends his life searching for that door leading to the garden where the panthers and the beautiful lady were. In later middle age, Wallace comes across it again. In fact, he comes across it three times in a year, that door which goes into ‘a beauty beyond dreaming’, and does not enter it. He’s too busy with worldly affairs. He’s a politician now, and has no time …
The reason Wells has never been properly accepted into the pantheon of English letters—or some would say ‘pantechnicon’—is mainly a squalid class reason, and has nothing to do with the fact that his original soaring imaginative genius eventually fell, like Icarus, back to Earth.
Those of us who love Wells and his books have sought in the past to defend him by claiming that he was successful first as an artist and later as propagandist. This is approximately the view of Bernard Bergonzi in his book The Early H. G. Wells.
Bergonzi says, ‘Wells ceased to be an artist in his longer scientific romances after the publication of The First Men in the Moon in 1901’. So persuasive is Bergonzi’s book that many of us have gone along with the reasoning. Any considerable revision of Wells must take into account Bergonzi’s arguments.
All the same, the minor amendment I have to offer is based largely on what I see as Wells’s second gambit to outwit the death of inspiration—second, I mean, to increasing doses of political speculation which fill his books. The second gambit is the policy of reversal, to which I have referred.
Even his role of educator is a role reversal. He had been the educated. To education he owed his escape from drapers, ignominy, and boots. The great leap of his life was from taught to teacher.
Teachers are forced into cycles of repetition to get the message to sink in. Wells’s books work rather like that at times. The little man of earlier books, Hoopdriver, Kipps, Mr Polly, Mr Lewisham, are recycled as powerful figures, at times only semi-human: Ostrog, Mr Parham, Rud Whitlow in The Holy Terror, and the grand Lunar.
With reversal went repetition. Other commentators have pointed out that the New Woman appears in more than one Wells novel. Ann Veronica has many sisters, not least Christina Alberta, and the charming Fanny Smith in The Dream. I don’t find this cause for complaint. Nor can we complain that so many of the books chase that idea of human betterment; this is grandeur rather than narrowness. What we are justified in complaining about is that so many of those plans for the future reveal an almost willful lack of understanding of mankind’s nature. It was Orwell who said that most of Mr Wells’s plans for the future had been realized in the Third Reich.
A fresh look at Wells’s canon, however, reveals some unexpected pleasures. I have recently had the chance to defend in print In the Days of the Comet (1906), not as a science fiction novel, which it only marginally is, but as one of Wells’s prime Condition of England novels—the phrase is Disraeli’s. It is a reversal, demonstrating how A Modern Utopia might come about, while providing as abrasive a picture of Edwardian England as Tono-Bungay; while in time it stands sandwiched between the two.
I would like to cite a paragraph from In the Days of the Comet, to serve as a reminder of how brilliantly Wells could recreate life in the days before he decided instead to theorize about it.
This is the passage where the humbly born Leadford is about to leave home forever, and to desert his mother as Wells’s mother later deserted him:
After our midday dinner—it was a potato-pie, mostly potato with some scraps of cabbage and bacon—I put on my overcoat and got it [my watch] out of the house while my mother was in the scullery at the back. A scullery in the old world was, in the case of such houses as ours, a damp, unsavoury, mainly subterranean region behind the dark living-room kitchen, that was rendered more than typically dirty in our cases by the fact that into it the coal-cellar, a yawning pit of black uncleanness, opened, and diffused small crunchable particles about the uneven brick floor. It was the region of the ‘washing-up’, that greasy, damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape-pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called ‘dish-clouts’, rise in my memory at the name. The altar of this place was the ‘sink’, a tank of stone, revolting to a refined touch, grease-filmed and unpleasant to see, and above this was a tap of cold water, so arranged that when the water descended it splashed and wetted whoever had turned it on. This tap was our water supply. And in such a place you must fancy a little old woman, rather incompetent and very gentle, a soul of unselfishness and sacrifice, in dirty clothes, all come from their original colours to a common dusty dark grey, in worn, ill-fitting boots, with hands distorted by ill use, and untidy greying hair—my mother. In the winter her hands would be ‘chapped’, and she would have a cough. And while she washes up I go out, to sell my overcoat and watch in order that I may desert her.
Everything comes beautifully together: the hatred of bad social conditions, the mixed feelings for the old woman, the sense that one can only get out and go on. It’s magnificent.
Later, in the mid-1920s, when, on the Bergonzi scale, Wells should be quite past it, we have a couple of novels which form reversals of an interesting kind. Christina Alberta’s Father is about a man who believes himself to be the Sumerian Sargon the First, King of Kings. The present of the novel becomes Sargon’s future. In The Dream, Sarnac is a man of the future who relives a life in the Edwardian present. Both these novels are highly readable, and The Dream is excellent—overlooked, apparently, because Wells failed to give it a noticeable title. The comedy and descriptions of low-life are in the best Kippsian manner. These novels date from 1924 and 1925, when Wells was under considerable mental stress. Indeed, Christina Alberta’s Father strikes a new note. A theme of insanity is introduced for the first time, and the scenes in the mental institution are vivid.
Where Sarnac dreams himself back into an ordinary life, the low Mr Preemby in Christina Alberta’s Father imagines himself to be lord and protector of the whole world. It is a role Wells was clearly taking on himself.
There’s much in Wells which reminds us of the productive French genius, Honoré de Balzac. Balzac wrote to a friend in 1820, saying, ‘Before long, I shall possess the secret of that mysterious power. I shall compel all men to obey me and all women to love me.’ He also said, ‘My only and immense desires, to be famous and to be loved’. He achieved both, and killed himself by overwork. Fame and love together were not enough to quench that void within him which was the fruit of his mother’s rejection and coldness to him. Wells is a similar case. His high and demanding productivity—The Outline of History, for instance, written in a year of ‘fanatical toil’—his deromanticized sexual activity, which continued into his seventies, point to an underlying anxiety and unhappiness.
Some commentators—among them the Mackenzies, I think—ascribe this to Wells’s feeling of pique against the middle class, to whom he had once been made to feel inferior. No doubt class enters into the matter, as it does into most English departments. But something buried deeper fed on Wells, that unassuageable void which a derelicting mother sometimes imposes on her children. Sarah Wells, H. G.’s mother, did her best, but she left her husband and kicked Bertie, then almost fourteen, into the wide world, to fend for himself—or rather, into the narrow world behind the draper’s counter—the same age at which another utopian, Aldous Huxley, lost his mother. The Mackenzies say that Wells bitterly resented this rejection, and we see that bitterness fermenting in his life.
His one escape from the draper’s counter was through education. No wonder that in later days he saw life as a race between education and catastrophe. So it had been for him. But he had made another reversal, into a solipsistic universe, where what was true for him as a youth became true for the whole world.
This turning away from the literary world to quasi-political involvement still seems curious, and curiously unfruitful. Yet an explanation for it appears in the best book on creativity ever written, which explores the vagaries of the creative spirit. In his work, The Dynamics of Creation,
Anthony Storr says:
The inability to stop working, to enjoy holidays, to allow time for relaxation or personal relationships, is often found among intensely ambitious men. In psychiatric practice, it is more often found among politicians and financiers than among artists … Politicians often arrange life so that they are busily engaged all the time they are awake … Political life is an ideal one for men who need to be ceaselessly occupied, who are driven to seek power by an inner insecurity, and who substitute extroverted activity for the self-knowledge which comes from cultivating personal relationships … Creative production can be a particularly effective method of protecting the self from the threat of an underlying depression.
We look on Wells with admiration. We also should spare him some sympathy. He who had so much drive was greatly driven. We have a right to be sad when his wonderful early sense of fun dies.
Wells reverts to animal metaphors to describe his state of mind. He is ‘a creature trying to find its way out of a prison into which it has fallen’. Indeed, his life seems unsettled and unsatisfying, despite his encounters with the wonderful Moura Budbergs of this world, despite his escapes to the South of France, and the various households he maintained in England and France.
No wonder he dreamed of panthers and pleasant gardens. Big cats are symbols of a guiltless promiscuity. Wells worked hard at that activity, but there was no way in which the door in the wall would ever open again. Such doors have a time-lock on them.
1. Manchester, Manchester University Press, 1961.
2. London, Seeker and Warburg, 1972.
THE ADJECTIVES OF ERICH ZANN (#ulink_faf1f92e-905a-508a-b0ff-aba42b0c37de)
A Tale of Horror (#ulink_67c1e2be-a15a-50e6-a91f-1b6a6f73b7b1)
In my lifetime, I have read only one story by H. P. Lovecraft. Yet that story I remember well, if only because I came upon it shortly after my twin brother committed suicide.
Somehow, talk of Lovecraft implies hushed talk of the past—awful attics or seedy cellars in which dreadful things lurk, waiting to emerge from long ago or far away, or both. From what I have heard, it is useless for anyone in the Lovecraftian universe to struggle. Lift a finger, and evil forces will come busting in. It was with compulsion greater than myself that I decided I must—whether I liked it or not—read once more that special story of his which has remained with me throughout so many years.
So, bearing a flambeau, I climb the stairs to a dusty attic where my precious few books are kept. On the way, I ponder the kindly if damp spirit of Lovecraft. This was the man who once declared, in words to be echoed by HAL in the movie 2001 almost half a century later, ‘Existence seems of little value and I wish it might be terminated’.
Remembrance told me how L. Sprague de Camp, in his 1975 biography of Lovecraft, had quoted the master as announcing that mankind were ‘wolves, hyenas, swine, fools, and madmen’. What sort of wisdom might we not expect from a man who had torn thus aside the tissue of lies behind which we hide our frailties? Even as I reached the chill attic, pulling my shawl more securely round my shoulders, I was aware of fear welling up inside me in a cascade of adjectives.
There on an upper shelf … I reach out … ah!, got it! That aged black book, from which I blow the dust. I open its pages with trembling fingers.
No, no, it’s not the Necronomicon, Cthulhu be praised! It’s a volume entitled Modern Tales of Horror, selected by Dashiell Hammett. The volume was published in London in 1932, by Victor Gollancz.
A precocious lad, I was seven when I bought it. For many years, it was my favourite book—favourite because it scared the life out of me. Also precious to me because at that age I was trying to become on good terms with my mother, and discovered that she was not averse to a good horror story. So I read aloud to her in our scullery while she did the ironing.
Two stories in the Hammett collection I read over and over. They were Paul Suter’s ‘Beyond the Door’ and Michael Joyce’s ‘Perchance to Dream’. (Thirty years later, I included that marvellous latter story in my Best Fantasy Stories, published by Faber & Faber.) We both trembled, my mother and I, in those long cosy peacetime afternoons. As long as she kept ironing and I kept reading, she never said another word about sending me off to an orphanage.
One story in the Hammett collection made us scream. It was ‘The Music of Erich Zann’, written by H. P. Lovecraft. We screamed with laughter. After all these years, it’s hard to see why we found it so funny; of course, it was a nervous time for us: the police were still investigating. The very name of Erich Zann broke us up. Then again, Zann, the crazy old musician, played a viol. Come on, guys, viola is serious. Violin is serious. Viol is FUNNY! Sounds like VILE, right?
This is my dictionary’s definition of a viol: ‘held between the knees when played’. You imagine someone playing a kind of violin, gripping it with his knees … I was also reading funnies to my mother, to keep her amiable, like Saki and Stephen Leacock. You remember Leacock’s ‘My Financial Career’? That broke us up. I thought she would have one of her fits. Lovecraft’s story is a kind of ‘My Musical Career’. I know that what I am saying will offend the devout, and that it just goes to show I was a hopeless neurotic aged seven, but that’s how it was. That’s what Zann did up in that peaked garret. Anyone for masturbation fantasies?
How was Zann’s playing on this instrument of his? Fantastic, delirious, hysterical, is the answer. Okay, but later? Oh, later, the frantic playing became a blind mechanical unrecognizable orgy, is the answer. And what was Zann doing while he played? He was dripping with an uncanny perspiration and twisted like a monkey, is the answer. You see, he was playing a wild Hungarian dance. Hence the uncanny perspiration. Are all Hungarian dances like that? Hope not, is the answer.
Something broke the glass and came in through the window while Zann was in this state. We never figured out what actually came in, apart from the blackness—though it’s true blackness screamed with shocking music. The Hungarians at it again, we supposed. Mother loved that bit. Perhaps she was thinking that my so-called father might be going to break in and attack us again. The idea certainly entered my mind. There was an hysterical edge to our laughter. Even as I read, I was dripping with uncanny perspiration.
It’s all so long ago. We were living in New England then. How foolish we were, how innocent, how—unread!
Even now, grey-haired and no longer quite so neurotic, I still see how whole sentences in that wonderful story must have struck those two 1930s idiots as funny. ‘My liking for him did not grow.’ ‘I had a curious desire to look out of that window, over the wall and down the unseen slope at the glittering roofs and spires which must lie outspread there.’ Well, all I can say is that when we looked out of our kitchen window we gazed down unseen slopes onto a banana yard.
To top it all, poor old Erich Zann was dumb and deaf. We had no idea of political correctness in our house. We were Presbyterians. We found deafness funny, particularly in a musician. (Beethoven was not on our curriculum.) Funny too, we thought in our perverted way, was the fate that overcame the old deaf wistful shabby grotesque strange satyrlike distorted nearly bald—with what youthful zeal I shouted out the adjectives!—viol-player. There’s the divinely hilarious moment when the unnamed hero feels ‘strange currents of wind’ and clutches Zann’s ice-cold stiffened unbreathing face, whose bulging eyes bulged uselessly into the void. I could hardly get the words out. Mother burnt a pair of pink bloomers with the iron.
Jesus, how we laughed. How silly I was at seven. Didn’t know a bit of good hokum when I saw it …
JEKYLL (#ulink_14a33294-3499-5654-912f-b6d672641a24)
All the characters in Stevenson’s story are isolated males: Mr Utterson, the lawyer; his friend and distant relation, Mr Enfield; Poole, the servant; and, of course, Dr Jekyll himself. They live separately in a city, the loneliest place. Jekyll himself foresees this isolation increasing in the future, when men become scarcely human, but rather ‘incongruous and independent denizens’. In the story, London masquerades as Stevenson’s native Edinburgh. All told, it’s a good setting for horror.
The horror is of a markedly cerebral kind. There are no monstrous creatures going about the world, as in Frankenstein or Dracula. Of course there is Hyde. But Hyde is a projection of Jekyll. This is why the story still interests us: Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is a pre-Jungian fable, a vivid illustration of the Shadow side of a decent man, that aspect—vigorously suppressed by the religious and ‘unco’ guid’ of Victorian Calvinist Scotland—of our natures whose presence we all have to acknowledge. The aspect which, as Jekyll says of his drug, shakes ‘the very fortress of identity’.
The fable concerns the shattering of this fortress. This is the point. The drug Jekyll takes is not the instrument of Hyde’s coming into being. The drug is merely a neutral means of transmission. In Jekyll’s words, ‘The drug had no discriminating action; it was neither diabolical nor divine; but it shook the doors of the prison house of my disposition’.
With these powerful words, Jekyll admits that had he undertaken his experiment in a nobler spirit, he might have released from within himself ‘an angel instead of a fiend’. How remarkably this reflection of the 1880s recalls comments on LSD experiments of the 1950s!
The best part of the novella—it’s scarcely a novel—resides in the final section, in Jekyll’s statement. It’s wonderful, a tour de force, although at the same time rather bloodless. Hyde’s sins are no more than alluded to. This is more a sermon than a horror tale. Here again, the future is prefigured. The drug cannot be correctly administered, or its effects controlled; we are reminded of L-dopa in Oliver Sachs’s remarkable story Awakenings, where any dose proved too little or too much.
Here is Stevenson’s moral imagination speaking, fleshing out what started as a dream (as did Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein). ‘It fell out with me, as it falls with so vast a majority of my fellows, that I chose the better part and was found wanting in the strength to keep to it.’ This is the Calvinist speaking, trying to hold to a rigid morality which the world was to cast aside in another generation or so, letting loose the Hyde of the First World War, 1914–1918.
Like the other two nineteenth-century novels of terror already referred to, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde has frequently been filmed. To my mind, all film versions of Frankenstein and Dracula are crude and almost parodic versions of the novels themselves.
Such is not the case with film versions of Dr Jekyll. The horror, as I’ve said, is too cerebral, too bloodless, for the movies. Injustice must be seen to be done. We have to be shown Fredric March or Spencer Tracy, or whoever it is, consorting with prostitutes, wielding the stick, being cruel. We have to see the beaker foam, with its deadly but seductive brew, to watch the terrible transformation, whiskers and all, take place … To witness what is at first willed become involuntary.
I believe Stevenson, the old Teller of Tales, would be pleased that Hollywood reached towards something darker and more disturbing than Treasure Island.
ONE HUMP OR TWO (#ulink_7d6621e0-f3fd-5101-894b-fe4e9c1efe63)
Lecture given at the IAFA Conference of the Fantastic (#ulink_e07582ac-ceae-5e25-b115-95fdd0ce4b1c)
I have come to few conclusions regarding national differences in British and American fantasy. The longer you look at the two animals the vaguer seem the distinctions. If you observe the dromedary or Arabian camel and the Bactrian camel—the only two sorts of camel on the planet—you immediately see the distinction we all know from childhood: the former has one hump, the latter two. But if you look at all other animals in the zoo, you don’t find anything else resembling a camel. Not even their relations, the llamas. The similarities are overwhelmingly greater than the differences.
Here we have these two camels, the US and the UK variety of fantasy. Here you have this panel reduced to counting humps.
Perhaps because of my early reading—my very early reading, when books still contained pictures—I regard fantasy, as distinct from SF, as having a spiritual, or perhaps I mean a religious, or perhaps I mean a metaphysical side. This regard comes from the area whence all memories spring, the personal deeps, compounded of old forgotten stories told and read, alchemic woodcuts, and perhaps a surly reproduction of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s doppelganger drawing, How They Met Themselves, with lovers deep in the forest, transfixed. Perhaps too the interchange of light and shade above one’s cot—who knows?
If forced to it for the purposes of this forum, I’d say that this spiritual aspect is largely absent in American fantasy and at least flickeringly present in the English stuff. Why should this be? Possibly for a simple reason: the English stuff is so much older, has a much more ancient lineage (though I don’t forget that lineage also became, because of our shared language, a shared American lineage two centuries ago; were it otherwise—were you all Greek speakers, say—I’d not be here arguing the toss). Did the 1980s yield in the US anything so powerful—so full of ancient power—as Robert Holdstock’s wonderful Mythago Wood? The past activates fantasy, as the future SF.
I’ve never seen a reference, even in Trillion Year Spree, to the fourteenth-century poem, written in Middle English, entitled ‘St Erkenwald’. The poem is probably by the unknown author of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. In the seventh century, the saint Erkenwald, as the poem tells, rebuilt St Paul’s cathedral in London on what had been a pagan site. Digging in the foundations, the workers come across an impressive sarcophagus on which are carved arcane sentences.
Wise men with wide foreheads, wondering in that pit Struggled without success to string them into words.
They lever up the lid of the coffin and find there a body nobly clad. The body is as fresh as if it were alive, with red lips and so on. After a prayer, St Erkenwald speaks to the corpse and rouses it, raises it from the dead, or at least from limbo. Unlike Lazarus, who keeps quiet about what happened to him, this revenant is talkative. He was a judge who has remained in limbo for almost eight hundred years. Having been born before Christ, he cannot enter Heaven, for all his good works. He’s a heathen. A point of Christian doctrine is being raised.
As Erkenwald blesses the judge in the name of the Father, his tears fall on the sufferer, who is thereby baptized. With joy, the heathen relates how his soul is released, to fly to Heaven.
With that he stopped speaking and said no more. But suddenly his sweet face sank in and vanished, And all the beauty of his body blackened like mould, As foetid as fungus that flies up in powder!
We seem to perceive here the precursor of a number of themes, from the Seven Sleepers of Ephesus, mentioned in Gibbon,
through to those two nineteenth-century monoliths of corrupt resurrection, Frankenstein and Dracula, passing on the way all the eerie vaults which lie in wait for the heroines of such Gothic works as Mrs Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries Of Udolpho.
One might also mention here ghost stories, a very English genre. Ghosts always appeared dressed—wearing something, armour, archaic costume, a winding sheet. In the poem, Erkenwald’s heathen similarly has the power to preserve his clothes intact. A peculiar power.
All this could hardly be called a tradition, but it does represent a line of thought. Perhaps it’s part and parcel of a consciousness of the buried past which is peculiarly British. In the USA, there was no buried past until yesterday; T. H. O’Sullivan was there to photograph the Battle of Gettysberg. You don’t share Europe’s secrecy. That’s why Hollywood’s in California, USA, not say, Paris, France. We have Stonehenge; you have Scientology. When you began to turn to scientific disciplines to uncover the forgotten story of the nomads who entered by way of the Bering Straits bridge, to fill this continent and its southern counterpart thousands of years ago, you created a new past—a future, as it were, with a sell-by date long expired.
Yet your past lacks a domestic touch, that intimacy with the past as dwelling in the next room behind the wardrobe, which is one essential of many British fantasies. Alan Garner’s work, for example, in Red Shift or The Owl Service, where ancient Celtic remains lie within sight of Jodrell Bank.
There isn’t and can’t be the equivalent of this kind of fantasy in the USA. The house is, of course, a dominant symbol in fiction from last century on, a common symbol all over the Western world. But houses evidently signify different things in the US and the UK.
Consider, for instance, the comparative scarcity of houses in the US, where 64% of the population own their own houses. The figure in England is about the same. With a population only four times larger than the UK and a land area about 3,000 times greater, the US plainly has comparatively fewer houses. Scarcity breeds suspicion. When our houses—our homes (that very English English word)—are haunted, we continue to live in them, quite often cherishing our ghost, giving it pet names. In the US, if we are to believe the evidence of the movies, from the celebrated Usher abode onwards, houses burst apart with evil. They provide no sanctuary. There’s little amity in Amityville, is there? Fantasy after fantasy shows houses going up in flames. Even in realist fantasies such as the movie Fatal Attraction, the home provides no secure place: the enemy worms her way in, supernaturally able to glide through phone, apartment and country house, into that sanctum sanctorum, the bathroom …
Having said all this, I have almost persuaded myself that there is a difference between the fantasy of the two countries. I’ve been talking only of subject matter and approach. Had we discussed style, we would have found more differences. But really it’s a matter of camels and humps again.
And, of course, the two animals have mated. The moment of coupling occurred in the 1960s, with the publication of Tolkien in the States. In England Tolkien’s The Lord of The Rings caused little stir. We’re long on genius, short on enthusiasm. It was here in the States that he was taken up on the most extraordinary scale. From then on, there was no respite. From then on, fantasy was to gain over SF. From then on, it was but a giant step forward for womankind to the Age of Le Guin and Earthsea and Anne McCaffrey and her dragons.
Now, fantasy and the elder gods rule supreme, like groundelder over-running a neglected estate.
Tis an unweeded garden, That grows to seed; things rank and gross in nature Possess it merely.
There’s so much imitation, so much derivation, so much commercialism, who can be bothered to judge? Discernment is lost. At last, all fantasy is the same. The successors of Thomas Covenant roam through lands resembling the lands of the Belgariad.
Et voilà—at last, what we’ve all been longing for! The result of this industrious miscegenation? A monstrosity with three humps! Yours, mine, ours.
1. Trans. Brian Stone, The Owl and the Nightingale, Penguin Books, 1971.
2. Edward Gibbon, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, 1773, Chapter XXXIII.
KAFKA’S SISTER (#ulink_0ebbb4e3-d384-5e39-832a-7cd50039b573)
‘How cold it is in the exploding world’ Julia and the Bazooka
When Franz Kafka wrote his famous letter to his father, one of his accusations was that his father did not keep the commandments he imposed on his son. Hence, said Kafka, his world had become divided into three parts.
In the first world, he felt himself a slave. The second world was a world of power, remote from him. The third was where everyone else lived happily and free from orders. Kafka’s lifelong guilt feelings arose from his oppressive sense of these divisions, brought about by his father’s transgressions. Kafka, in the words of one of his editors, Erich Heller, had ‘an irresistible tendency to fall apart’, contained only by his writing. Writing was his way of survival.
The parallels with the writer calling herself Anna Kavan are strong. Her quarrel was with a mother who would not keep her own commandments. Like Kafka, Kavan seems as a child always to have felt herself in the wrong; and this feeling, as she reached adult years, also matured, into the prevailing sense that somehow her existence was unjustified, insubstantial. Like Kafka, she suffered in her struggle to come to terms with other people, and with herself.
‘It is as if I were made of stone, as if I were my own tombstone’, complains Kafka in his diary for 1910.
‘What exactly is it that’s wrong with me? What is the thing about me that people can never take?’, asks the narrator in Kavan’s wartime story, ‘Glorious Boys’.
‘And where am I to find a little warmth in this?’, asks the narrator in ‘My Madness’, as she becomes her own tribunal.
Implicitly, these and similar questions are asked in story after story. The ‘I’ character, a mirror image of Kavan, always expresses the same gamut of anxiety. The search is on, for something lost in childhood to be found in adult life. Insidious as a serpent comes the fear of others, the fear of relationships, but, most destructively, the fear of the self with its inadequacies, the first of Kafka’s three dreaded divisions.
